8 ms·

In 1995, we watched these 1979 videos of Smalltalk in my programming languages college computer science course, which focused on Scheme. I vividly remember the

by mmarks 12y ago

In 1995, we watched these 1979 videos of Smalltalk in my programming languages college computer science course, which focused on Scheme. I vividly remember the reaction of my fellow students. Given the mockery and jokes from my fellow students, you'd think they were watching a bad sci-fi movie. Most students discounted everything they saw, 'real men and real programmers used C'. I remember being so disheartened that it seemed we'd evolved so little in tools/languages from 1979 - 1995. At the time, everything was Unix and C programming (DEC Alpha were just being installed on campus, Windows 95 had just been released). There were a lot of reasons Unix/C succeeded, there is a great classic paper about why C beat Lisp, and I agree with the author. However, what always troubled me, is how my fellow students completely ignored any potential learnings from those videos. In many ways, those early Smalltalk programs were far more impressive than anything they had created, but they just wrote them off. At GDC 2014, a post-mortem was presented on the classic game Myst. That was written entirely in Hypercard.

sebastianconcpt 12y ago
Thanks for sharing. Do you have a reference to that paper on C and LISP?
- mahmud 12y ago
  I think mmarks is referring to this classic: https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
  - tbirdz 12y ago
    Please note, the actual essay in question is here: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
    I just discovered that Gabriel wrote a rebuttal to himself under a pseudonym : https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf
jarcane 12y ago
The prejudice of programmers is one of the biggest hindrances of technological advancement in computing AFAIC. Think about it: currently, functional programming is, finally, getting some well deserved recognition in the wider programming world. Yet almost everything it presents has been present in programming for as much as 45 years. The original paper on Hindley's type system was published in 1969. Milner's theory went to print in 1978. Scheme first appeared in 1975 and was already building off functional ideas that had been spawned by earlier Lisps. Guy Steele designed an actual Scheme CPU in hardware in 1979. And yet even today, a non-trivial number of programmers react with absolute horror at the idea of a Lisp (usually based solely on ignorant trivialities like the parens-syntax), more or less exactly as your C programming classmates did in 1995, and while FP is starting to gain major inroads in some spheres, others dismiss the whole field as wank and Java and C remain kings that are unlikely to be unseated for another decade at a minimum, if ever. We remain utterly bound to one model of hardware, one model of programming, and largely, only a couple models of operating system, after decades of development, because so many programmers react with horror at anything they're unfamiliar with or that deviates from the percieved norm, be it in features, syntax, or focus. And God forbid you make anything that might actually be easy for non-programmers to learn. It will be more or less met with instant and persistent scorn, and its users derided and outcast, simply because they didn't use a 'Real Programming Language' like C. Go ask a BASIC coder what life has been like for the last 40 years, or a game dev who worked in AGS or GameMaker prior to the last half decade or so. Hell, I have a friend who still sneers at visual layout designers. The divide described in the article is very much culturally enforced as much as economically.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  And God forbid you make anything that might actually be easy for non-programmers to learn. It will be more or less met with instant and persistent scorn, and its users derided and outcast, simply because they didn't use a 'Real Programming Language' like C. Prejudice doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. Functional programmers think differently, and what's obvious to the Functionals isn't to the Statefuls. And the Statefuls are currently most of the world. I've flip-flopped myself, because while I love the elegance of being a Fucntional, being a Stateful is just so much more productive. There are a few reasons for this: If I want to make a game, there's no good functional framework. If I want to write a script to get something done, like download a webpage, my goto language is Python because I know for a fact that their libraries work and that their documentation is almost always stellar. Contrast that with Lisp where you can spend at least a day just getting the environment set up in a way that asdf doesn't hate. Especially on Windows. (Yes, if you want to make games, Windows needs to support your dev environment.) My info about asdf is a couple years out of date, because to be honest I haven't felt inclined to look into it again after some bad experiences. Haskell could be wonderful. Never tried it. Will someday. Until then, I'd love some sort of competition where a Haskell programmer and myself are given a task, like "write a script to X," where X is some real-world relevant task and not an academic puzzle, and see who finishes it first. It would be illuminating, since I'd give myself about a 30% chance of finishing first, but it would reveal what I'm lacking. Arc had potential. It really did. Everyone just gave up on it, and it never attracted the kind of heroic programmers that Clojure did. So the wildcard seems to be Clojure. It's a decent mix of performant, practical, and documented. I'm out of time to pursue this comment further, but the main point is just that FP's problems have very little to do with societal acceptance or scorn. If you're running into that, you're probably running with a bad crowd anyway. It's mostly because imperative languages are popular, so network effects mean they'll just get better and better. If FP wants to chip away at that, it'll need to start off better and stay better. "Better" is many things, but it includes performance, cross-platformability (yes, Windows is necessary), documentation, and practicality (the ability to quickly accomplish random tasks without a huge prior time investment, Python seems to be the best at this so far).
jared314 12y ago
GDC 2013 Myst Postmortem: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018048/Classic-Game-Postmortem http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018048/Classic-Game-Postmortem Their Hypercard experience is at the 38 minute mark.
gaius 12y ago
Sorry, it's just bemusing thinking of 19-year-old college students bragging about being real men. But this is the problem with our profession, it's baked in at a deep level that old == bad. So every new generation reinvents the wheel, worse than the last. The truth is all the big problems in software were solved in the 1970s, if only we would pay attention. The only actual progress in computing is that the hardware guys make everything faster.

by mmarks 12y ago

sebastianconcpt 12y ago

Thanks for sharing. Do you have a reference to that paper on C and LISP?

mahmud 12y ago
I think mmarks is referring to this classic: https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
- tbirdz 12y ago
  Please note, the actual essay in question is here: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  I just discovered that Gabriel wrote a rebuttal to himself under a pseudonym : https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf

jarcane 12y ago

The prejudice of programmers is one of the biggest hindrances of technological advancement in computing AFAIC. Think about it: currently, functional programming is, finally, getting some well deserved recognition in the wider programming world. Yet almost everything it presents has been present in programming for as much as 45 years. The original paper on Hindley's type system was published in 1969. Milner's theory went to print in 1978. Scheme first appeared in 1975 and was already building off functional ideas that had been spawned by earlier Lisps. Guy Steele designed an actual Scheme CPU in hardware in 1979. And yet even today, a non-trivial number of programmers react with absolute horror at the idea of a Lisp (usually based solely on ignorant trivialities like the parens-syntax), more or less exactly as your C programming classmates did in 1995, and while FP is starting to gain major inroads in some spheres, others dismiss the whole field as wank and Java and C remain kings that are unlikely to be unseated for another decade at a minimum, if ever. We remain utterly bound to one model of hardware, one model of programming, and largely, only a couple models of operating system, after decades of development, because so many programmers react with horror at anything they're unfamiliar with or that deviates from the percieved norm, be it in features, syntax, or focus. And God forbid you make anything that might actually be easy for non-programmers to learn. It will be more or less met with instant and persistent scorn, and its users derided and outcast, simply because they didn't use a 'Real Programming Language' like C. Go ask a BASIC coder what life has been like for the last 40 years, or a game dev who worked in AGS or GameMaker prior to the last half decade or so. Hell, I have a friend who still sneers at visual layout designers. The divide described in the article is very much culturally enforced as much as economically.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
And God forbid you make anything that might actually be easy for non-programmers to learn. It will be more or less met with instant and persistent scorn, and its users derided and outcast, simply because they didn't use a 'Real Programming Language' like C. Prejudice doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. Functional programmers think differently, and what's obvious to the Functionals isn't to the Statefuls. And the Statefuls are currently most of the world. I've flip-flopped myself, because while I love the elegance of being a Fucntional, being a Stateful is just so much more productive. There are a few reasons for this: If I want to make a game, there's no good functional framework. If I want to write a script to get something done, like download a webpage, my goto language is Python because I know for a fact that their libraries work and that their documentation is almost always stellar. Contrast that with Lisp where you can spend at least a day just getting the environment set up in a way that asdf doesn't hate. Especially on Windows. (Yes, if you want to make games, Windows needs to support your dev environment.) My info about asdf is a couple years out of date, because to be honest I haven't felt inclined to look into it again after some bad experiences. Haskell could be wonderful. Never tried it. Will someday. Until then, I'd love some sort of competition where a Haskell programmer and myself are given a task, like "write a script to X," where X is some real-world relevant task and not an academic puzzle, and see who finishes it first. It would be illuminating, since I'd give myself about a 30% chance of finishing first, but it would reveal what I'm lacking. Arc had potential. It really did. Everyone just gave up on it, and it never attracted the kind of heroic programmers that Clojure did. So the wildcard seems to be Clojure. It's a decent mix of performant, practical, and documented. I'm out of time to pursue this comment further, but the main point is just that FP's problems have very little to do with societal acceptance or scorn. If you're running into that, you're probably running with a bad crowd anyway. It's mostly because imperative languages are popular, so network effects mean they'll just get better and better. If FP wants to chip away at that, it'll need to start off better and stay better. "Better" is many things, but it includes performance, cross-platformability (yes, Windows is necessary), documentation, and practicality (the ability to quickly accomplish random tasks without a huge prior time investment, Python seems to be the best at this so far).

jared314 12y ago

GDC 2013 Myst Postmortem: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018048/Classic-Game-Postmortem http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018048/Classic-Game-Postmortem Their Hypercard experience is at the 38 minute mark.

gaius 12y ago

Sorry, it's just bemusing thinking of 19-year-old college students bragging about being real men. But this is the problem with our profession, it's baked in at a deep level that old == bad. So every new generation reinvents the wheel, worse than the last. The truth is all the big problems in software were solved in the 1970s, if only we would pay attention. The only actual progress in computing is that the hardware guys make everything faster.